Aiding and Abetting...what a cesspool...
Posted on 04/13/2005 11:15:00 AM PDT by Cableguy
AGUA PRIETA, Mexico – Hector Salazar's chases through the desert creosote and sagebrush west of here last week began like many encounters between illegal immigrants and the U.S. Border Patrol.
But Salazar works for the Mexican government. He cruises the rough dirt roads of the sprawling La Morita ranch in an orange pickup emblematic of Grupo Beta, the Mexican agency whose mission is to protect immigrants approaching the border, not to arrest them.
As he overtook a group of six young men filing north with small backpacks, he told them about the Minutemen who had taken up positions on a ridge a few hundred yards to the north, just beyond the barbed wire border fence.
"They're over there, observing you," he said, pointing to the sparks of sunlight that flashed off the cars and trucks of the volunteer civilian group that is here to spotlight what members call Washington's failure to control the border. The Minutemen waited in lawn chairs, binoculars scanning southward, cell phones ready to summon the Border Patrol.
"We recommend that you don't try to cross here," Salazar said. "The decision is yours, but it would be better to try somewhere else."
The men piled into the back of the truck for the half-hour ride back into town. It was a victory for Grupo Beta, which is under orders from Mexico City to help head off confrontations that could aggravate border tensions.
But Salazar also proved a point for Minuteman organizer James Gilchrist, who accuses Washington of failing to protect the border from illegal immigrants looking for work and terrorists looking for trouble.
"We're here to demonstrate that physical presence on the border will seal the border," said Gilchrist, who calls for a tripling of the Border Patrol to 30,000 agents.
Border expert Peter Andreas says there's nothing new to Gilchrist's claim. He says it was proven in San Diego a decade ago, when public outcry prodded Washington to mobilize Operation Gatekeeper.
"That was a high profile, in-your-face show of authority and force at the border," said Andreas, a Brown University professor and author of "Border Games," which says federal policy is as concerned with managing public perceptions as it is with managing illegal immigration.
While Gatekeeper proved successful at restoring calm "and placating voters" in San Diego County, Andreas and others are dubious about the prospects of sealing the entire 1,950-mile border. Much of it is desert valleys separated by rugged mountain ranges.
Just east and west of the San Pedro River Valley, where the Minutemen have set up lawn-chair observation posts in the last week along roads tame enough for satellite TV trucks, the mountainous terrain defies the Border Patrol's SUVs.
Even in the relative flatness of the valley, where the Border Patrol has a strong presence, smugglers often send one group forward to be arrested.
They know the paperwork and transportation will tie up agents long enough for them to send other groups right behind to rendezvous with a driver at a mile marker or near a culvert.
The traffic is intense, with the Border Patrol apprehending an average of 1,600 people a day along the Arizona line. A declaration by Robert Bonner, commissioner of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, that he had a "comprehensive strategy" to take "operational control" of the 387-mile Arizona border fell flat with Andreas.
"Ultimately it's more about domestic politics than about securing the border," he said.
He noted that immigration anxiety once confined to the border has gone nationwide over the past decade, as the nation's illegal immigrant population has soared to an estimated 10 million to 12 million.
"Suddenly, much of the United States is de facto border states," he said, an observation that explains why the Minuteman volunteers here came from across the country.
Last week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded to a question about the Minutemen with the claim that the Bush administration has "taken a lot of steps to better control our borders to prevent people who shouldn't be coming into this country from entering the country."
But while the administration can point to the expansion of the Border Patrol and to an array of surveillance tools, from motion sensors in the ground to unmanned vehicles in the air, virtually no effort has been made to turn off the magnet of the low-wage American workplace.
Three hours north of the Arizona-Mexico border, a few hundred yards from the interstate highway on which smugglers shuttle immigrants into Phoenix, the power of the job magnet to overwhelm border enforcement was on display Thursday morning along Avenida del Yaqui.
Two groups of illegal immigrants, there since dawn to look for a day's work, talked openly about their detours around the Border Patrol.
Hector Alvarez, 28, was surprised at how easy it was to come across near Nogales, where a smuggler charged him $1,100 for the trip to Phoenix.
"We just walked two hours" to a rendezvous with a car, he said. "Next time, I'll do it on my own."
Even in the heart of Douglas, a border town that has seen a Gatekeeper-like buildup in response to local unrest, smugglers make a mockery of the notion of "operational control."
The steel-rod border fence there is scarred by hundreds of lines of brownish-black welds, repairs to a barrier that smugglers saw through with blades they leave in the dust.
Congress' decades-long refusal to establish a reliable worker verification policy, its acceptance of a system in which immigrants use phony documents to pretend to be legal and employers pretend to believe them, keeps the exodus moving.
So last week, as a young Mexican from near Mexico City accepted a ride from Salazar after learning that the Minuteman planned to leave at the end of April, he waved at one of Salazar's colleagues and said, "See you next month."
"The Minutemen waited in lawn chairs, binoculars scanning southward"
Oh my God! such terrible , heartless and vicious vigilantes!
critics of Minuteman Project , hang your head in shame....
our fate is in our own hands , none others
Hello Washington? Hello Mr. President? Hello to the Congress?? Hello anyone in Washington....????
President Bush should thank the Minutemen and apologize. Then take some action...I'm especially unhappy with the Mexican Govt response.
Apparently, the millions who have illegally crossed our southern border are not among those who "shouldn't be coming into this country" because they certainly weren't prevented "from entering the country".
It's the truth! Both parties are ignoring the fact that the taxpayer's are spending MILLIONS on ILLEGALS just because these damn politicians are more worried about getting elected and receiving campaign cash from employer's of these ILLEGALS. Taxpayer's are subsidizing these employer's by paying for the health care, education, etc. of these ILLEGALS. NO, we aren't getting "cheap goods" when you figure that fact in to the mix.
Thanks to this news. It inspired me various ideas.
Ping
Aiding and Abetting...what a cesspool...
RICO the employers.
He hates them for exposing his malfeasance on the issue.
I'm especially unhappy with the Mexican Govt response
The Mexican "government" is a semi-organized criminal gang. Anyone who believes different is living in fantasyland.
You shouldn't expect anything but sleazy criminality from them, and should not be surprised when they engage in it.
That's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing BUT the truth.
And confiscate their property. If they want it back, tell them to have the Mexican government recover it for them. After all, that's the group they're loyal to.
:^)
I've known a few landscapers casually over the years and they had the general attitude of "screw you" so I say "screw them."
Thanks for the ping HJ..!
Discussing the border problems here is a bit like pissing down your leg during a Chicago winter's storm.
It'll give you a warm feeling for a minute or so and then you'll quickly be restored to reality.
FReeRepublic worked well for a while because we were all focused behind the single primary purpose of seeing to Billy Blythe's impeachment and the backs of members of what after all turns out to have been only second-worst twentieth-century "administration" -- the Carter Gang having successfully restaked its claim to be the worst.
Bubbah's impeachment and the Rule of Law were defaecated upon by the Senate's Protect The Oligarchy Society -- and one Scotsman -- and the Cli'ton Crime-Family's "administration" ran its lying, looting, mass-murdering, co-serial-raping course.
FReeRepublic can work well again but not by being all things to all comers.
These days one is as likely to be engaged here -- and distracted from FReeRepublic's aspirations, tenets, precepts and goals -- by Indians and Chinese and Limeys and aliens of every other kind -- and with and by the attitudes and mind-sets cast off and discarded by Americans two hundred years ago.
Only distractions would be bad enough -- if that was all they were -- but in many ways some subtle and some less so what begin as distractions quickly turn out to have caused dissent among us -- and to have reduced FReeRepublic to little more than a multi-national personality-driven irrelevance.
An urgent drive to see that "border control" is restored and that our beloved Republic is guarded against the increasingly-hostilely colonizing alien-invader armies that are over-running us is a noble cause -- but it is not a Primary Purpose.
The only single purpose that can redeem, re-focus and re-direct FReeRepublic, it seems to me -- and see us once again united and marching in step and behind a single pennant -- would be that of uniting behind the idea that if we are not to lose our Republic we must achieve Term Limits -- and rid ourselves of career politicians.
All of the rest of our concerns -- the courts, for example -- can be dealt with only after we rid ourselves -- by term-limiting them -- of such career scum as have destroyed representative government -- and who, by cynical Republocrat gerrymandering, get to chose their electors rather than being choen by us.
Impose Term Limits and the courts -- for example -- may be flushed clean of their communist activists.
And we may see to the restoration of our Sovereign Borders!
Both parties are involved and powerful other sources..
What sources.?. dunno.. and DON"T CARE.. My only question is how long before the revolution.?. Washington D.C. is disfunctional.. and WILL NOT get better.. The founders were correct.. Thats WHY we have the 2nd amendement.. Meterosexual solutions will not help this system.. Freedom costs BLOOD always not sometimes.. But a revolution would seriously mess with your lifestyle.. and family connections..
Thats why it probably WON'T happen.. Americans are spoiled and Washington D.C. and "the powers" know it.. We'll just whine on the internet... we're addicted to this Dualocracy. which is a democracy and a republic no more..
-- Thomas Paine
So be it...
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